Archive for November, 2006

This site provides information about online pharmacies but doesn’t sell any drugs.

This site is about online pharmacies and shares information about the drugs that people can buy online. We are interested in learning about unsafe online pharmacy stories as well as peopleâ€™s successes with ordering medications over the Internet.

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This was interesting to read right now, since we’re hoping to push a new release of Collabofit later today.

21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time

Jim McCarthy, Microsoft Corporation

Shipping great software on time is a difficult but not impossible task. Elements you think would count the most count for very little. Development methodology, process, technical prowess, excellence of tools and depth of project management skills all influence the outcome of a software development project; but nothing indicates success as much as the manager’s ability to focus on a few critical and conceptually simple things. These things can be expressed as rules of thumb.

I enumerate twenty-one of these rules of thumb. Pick a handful (or so), apply them, and your project will be more likely to succeed. I lump them into three groups: “Shipping,” “Great Software,” “On Time”. Duh. I cover them in a different order, because the concepts build a bit.

TextLinkAds is now offering a new service called ReviewMe.com where bloggers get paid to write about stuff. As I am a current customer of TextLinkAds, I thought I’d give it a try. So here it is, my first paid-for review.

Things I like about ReviewMe.com so far:

Pleasant graphic design (Web 2.0 style points)

Not too heavy on the ajax interactions

Fairly clear explanations of how things work (though, see the not-likes below for more on this).

I feel like I can trust them since I’m already dealing with the parent company TextLinkAds.

The amount that they’re offering seems like a good amount ($30 to write this particular review, for example).

Getting my PayPal account details right up front and offering check payments as well. That feels like I’ll get paid.

Disclosure Policy I really like that they have a clear policy of disclosure when posting a paid review. That seems like a clean, clear and honest approach that will at least let readers know when a post has been sponsored.

Things I’m not completely thrilled about:

Having to supply SSN right up front. A lot of services make this a later step. I know why they need it (it’s the law in the United States), but I’d feel more comfortable if they requested this particular info after I had completed the signup process.

Need more clarity for the blogger user type (me) for how to get new reviews, or maybe an explanation that’s not just in the FAQ. If I submitted a site as a blogger / publisher, you should provide me with a clear next step and set my expectations. I felt a sense of “what’s next” after completing signup.

All in all, I’m excited about this program and having it help pay for my monthly hosting fees. If you have a website, or want to pay to have bloggers like me post reviews of your product on their sites, I’d recommend giving it a try.

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Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We’re awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement… but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3 hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we’re disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.